


Seasons Don't Fear

by acaelousqueadcentrum



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2016-06-26
Packaged: 2018-07-18 11:03:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7312456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acaelousqueadcentrum/pseuds/acaelousqueadcentrum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The aftermath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seasons Don't Fear

It’s weeks before Waverly speaks again.

After they’d exorcised the demon from her body.

After Wynonna had stood over the creeping, crawling body of the beast and put a bullet through its heart.

After Black Badge had come in to dispose of the remains, and Dolls had done whatever he’d done to appeal to the higher-ups and get reassigned to Purgatory.

After they’d taken a shaking, silent Waverly to the hospital in the back seat of Gus’s old truck. Doc driving as carefully as possible along the old dirt road, afraid to jostle the precious cargo, and Wynonna looking back from the front seat with jealous, concerned eyes at the way her only living sister clung to the newest member of their secret government team.

Waverly doesn’t speak, but she cries.

Any time Wynonna gets close to her. Any time Wynonna tries to comfort her, to reach out and pull her baby sister into her arms.

And while Wynonna is the only one who elicited that particular reaction, the presence of anyone who wasn’t Nicole causes her to curl up in on herself, to make herself as tiny as possible, pulling her knees up into her chest, wrapping her arms around her body.

As if she wants to disappear, to be invisible.

As if she can’t bear the weight of the world, of the looks they gave her. Dolls, and Doc, and worst of all, Wynonna.

Everyone but Nicole.

~ * ~

Waverly won’t speak, and so Nicole fills the empty space in the chilly hospital room with words.

She spends her days picking up the mess left behind by whatever supernatural villain Wynonna’s taken her grief and anger out on the night before, and clocks out at exactly 4:15 every evening, changing into clothes that are soft and comfortable before picking up food and driving over to the hospital where the doctors still have Waverly under observation.

And her nights–her nights she spends curled up around Waverly in the small hospital bed, telling the woman she loves about her day. About the cat she chased out of the station. About the joke Doc told her, the one about the prospector and the innkeeper’s wife.

And Waverly doesn’t laugh, but she smiles softly, and rests her head against Nicole’s shoulder, rubbing her cheek against the worn-cotton of the sweatshirt her girlfriend sleeps in.

Love doesn’t need words, Nicole thinks to herself as Wave’s breathing gets slower, deeper. As Waverly’s weight goes slack against her, until she finally drifts off to sleep.

Sometimes you can hear it loudest in the silence.

~ * ~

She finds Wynonna walking aimlessly down the long road to the homestead one morning. Listing back and forth, stopping every so often to lean against a tree, to take another deep swig from the bottle she carries with her.

Her fists are bloody and her nose is bleeding, and she’s got bruises around her wrists, along the exposed skin of her collarbone.

And she’s ashamed to admit it, but she’s glad when the other woman takes a wild swing at her, missing by a foot and tripping over herself as she does. Glad because it gives her an excuse to apply a little force.

“Earp,” Nicole shouts, trying to get control over the drunk, grieving woman, “if you don’t stop resisting I’m going to arrest you and throw you into the drunk tank!”

And maybe it’s her words, or maybe it’s the liquor and the anger finally overpowering her, but Wynonna stops fighting.

Then promptly vomits all over her own boots.

But when Nicole grabs the woman roughly by the thick leather of her empty gunbelt–Dolls had confiscated Peacekeeper over a week ago, the same day he told his agent to clean herself up or get out of his sight–all the fight that’s been building up inside of her slips away.

From both of them.

Wynonna slumps to the ground, limp and docile at last, and Nicole sees the tears, the anguish.

“Come on, Wy,” she says, gentler now, and helps the woman up and into the cruiser, taking off her jacket and folding it into a pillow for Wynonna on the ride back to the station.

She doesn’t call it in, sparing Wynonna the latest in a long list of marks on her record, but radios dispatch that she’s out of service for a bit, and takes Waverly’s sister to the homestead, where Doc meets them and promises to take care of her from there.

~ * ~

“Waves,” she whispers, waking the younger woman with a gentle brush of her hand along Waverly’s cheek, “baby.”

And the smile that Waverly gives her when she opens her eyes, it warms the deputy from the inside out. Chases away every last hint of the chill that’d sunk into her bones as she wrestled with Wynonna out on the road.

“Honey,” Nicole says softly, “I don’t care if you never speak another word. I love you. I’m yours–for as long as you’ll have me, I’m yours. But I think you need to see Wynonna. And I know she needs to see you. You both have lost so much, and been through so much. And it’s killing her, baby, and I know, it’s killing you too.”

Waverly’s eyes well up with tears, and her lower lip trembles, and Nicole knows that she’s done the right thing. As much as it hurts her to see Waverly sad and shaking, she knows, this, too, is a kind of healing.

~ * ~

“Hey, baby girl,” Wynonna says apprehensively from the doorway of Nicole’s bedroom, where Waverly’s been staying since the week before when the doctors declared that there was nothing else they could do for her, that she was as ready to go home as she’d ever be.  

And Waverly looks past her, to Nicole who stands at Wynonna’s back, keeping her steady. Keeping all of them steady.

And then she nods.

An invitation.

Wynonna sags, like she’d put all her energy into expecting another rejection.

Nicole knows–it might have happened, Waves deciding at the last moment that she wasn’t ready, that she couldn’t do this.

Because it’s taken awhile–for both of them–to get to this point. Because as much as Nicole knows it needs to happen, she’d told Wynonna it wouldn’t until she was sober. Because Waverly needs her big sister, not the shadow Wynonna had become.

Today, though, Wynonna’s eyes are clear and her knuckles are healed. And while her hands are shaking–her whole body, really–it’s nervous fear, not anger, not alcohol.

“Come on, Wynonna,” Nicole says gently from behind, and gives the other woman a little push.

~ * ~

It’s quiet at first, Waverly curled into herself, sitting back against the carved wooden headboard of Nicole’s bed. And Wynonna, shoes off and sitting-cross legged, leaning on one of the posts at the foot of the bed.

And then Wynonna breaks the silence, as clumsy as she ever is. Not careful, not delicate, but blunt and forceful. Words tumbling from her mouth like quicksand, pulling her under.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Waves,” she says, and leans forward, like she wants to touch her sister, but stops herself. Remembering the moments immediately after they’d exorcised the demon. How Waverly had wept every time Wynonna came close. How she’d shuddered violently every time Wynonna’s fingers brushed against her skin, jumped every time her name slipped off Wynonna’s tongue.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t stop her, I tried–I tried,” Wynonna cries, wiping angrily at her eyes. “I almost lost you and I didn’t know what to do–I couldn’t save you, I can’t save anybody. It’s my fault, it’s all my fault; I try and I try and I only ever fuck things up worse–”

“Stop!”

The word is a hoarse, forceful whisper, and Nicole feels the whisper of electricity along her skin, every nerve in her body naked and charged.

God, she’d almost forgotten how beautiful Waverly’s voice is, the excited thrum of her blood whenever she hears it.

“Stop,” Waverly says again, though the room is silent now but for Wynonna’s heavy, haunted breathing. “It’s my fault. I’m the one who’s sorry.”

And Nicole and Wynonna can’t do anything but stare at her, love and confusion written all over their faces.

“If I’d been stronger, if I’d been better, I could have fought it off, Wy,” she says, every word a little clearer, a little louder. “Every thing I did while–while it was in me–I felt. I did. It’s like it recognized the darkness in me, like it knew exactly where to look for the hatred and the anger and the fear. And it found them, made them bigger inside of me–”

“Wave, baby,” Nicole tries to interrupt, to get Waverly to take a breath, take a moment.

But her girlfriend ignores her.

Or maybe she doesn’t hear her at all.

“–but it was always me inside, Wynonna. Maybe it made them bigger but it was my darkness behind what happened, my fault. It was my fault.”

“Oh, sweet baby girl,” Wynonna says, crying openly now. This time she doesn’t stop herself from moving closer, from gathering up her little sister into a tight embrace as Waverly continues to spill her soul.

“Maybe if I was an Earp, maybe I could have fought it off. But I’m not strong like you–”

“What?” Wynonna asks, pulling back to look Waverly in the eyes, “what the fuck do you mean you’re not an Earp?”

And Waverly gasps.  

She hadn’t meant to say that, Nicole can tell. Just like she knows that they are the words that have been caught in Waverly’s throat all these weeks. The secret she couldn’t speak. The words she couldn’t let go.

“I’m not an Earp,” the smaller woman repeats. “I’m not Wade Earp’s daughter. I’m no use to you, I can’t help break the curse. I’m no one, Wynonna.”

And now Nicole can see the fires burning bright again in Wynonna’s eyes. The fight and the flame that has been missing for all these long weeks.

“Who the fuck told you that,” she demands, hands curled into fists.

And though Nicole sees them, hears the anger at the forefront of Wynonna’s words, it’s the first time in weeks that she’s not afraid of what Waverly’s older sister will do. To herself, to anyone else.  
.  
Waverly looks up at her sister for a moment, eyes red.

“Bobo,” she answers. “Just before he and Willa left for the boundary. Said I wasn’t an Earp. That probably explains why daddy–why daddy–”

But she starts to cry again, and Wynonna pulls her close, whispering into her hair.

And Nicole can’t hear what she’s whispering, but she doesn’t need to. Waverly wraps her arms tight around her sister holds on with everything inside of her, all the while Wynonna just rocks her back and forth.

Gently.

Like a mother would.

And not for the first time, Nicole’s heart breaks at all the loss these two women have endured. A mother and father, a sister, every adult who ever cared for them after.

Even each other, for a time.

But in this moment, she can almost hear the bond between them knit itself back together. The love, it was always there, but the fear, the worry, she watches it slip from Waverly’s limbs, from the set of her shoulders, the long line of her spine.

Content that things are finally, finally on their way to being okay again, Nicole steps out of the room, wanting to give the sisters time alone together.

And there’s a lightness in her step now, a carefree lilt to her thoughts that’s been missing over the past weeks, as worry for Waverly, for Wynonna, for everyone touched by that night, that betrayal, has weighed her down.

Life, she thinks, and looks outside at the garden across the street, the bits of green just beginning to poke through the brown and white patches of snow and dirt, is just about ready to start again.

~ * ~

She sleeps that night with two Earps in her bed, Wynonna unwilling to let Waverly go for the moment, and Waverly insisting that she sleeps better in Nicole’s arms.

And when she wakes, the sun is shining in through her bedroom window, and Waverly is awake, sitting up against the headboard, looking as close to her old self as she has in weeks. And Nicole knows, this has marked them all. But this morning, this beautiful morning, she has faith.

Everything will be alright.

~ * ~

_**Epilogue** _

Later, while she’s making breakfast while Waverly sets the table and Wynonna struggles with her coffee maker, there’s a soft knock at the door. And then Doc is standing in her kitchen, dressed in what Nicole suspects are his finest clothes, and with a small little bouquet of wild daisies that he holds out for Waverly.

“Excuse me for interrupting, ladies,” he says, charm incarnate, “but I heard that someone was maybe up for a little polite company.”

And Wynonna snorts.

“Oh, and when do you think someone polite will show up,” she teases, ignoring the look he sends her way.

“Now Waverly,” he says softly, “I hope you don’t mind, but your sister told me last night what the late Bobo Del Rey said to you, and how deeply it has upset you.”

Nicole takes the pan of eggs off the burner, shoulders tightening at the slight tension that fills the air as they all wait for Waverly to respond.

“No,” she says, and gestures for him to sit. But he refuses, choosing instead to stand before her.

“Good. Because I have to say, that’s the most hogwash thing I ever heard. You may not be his blood, Waverly Earp, but trust a man who knew him well, you are his very soul. You are the best of him, and you are the best of us.”

And it’s quiet again as Waverly looks up at him, eyes inscrutable.

But then she smiles, sweet and pure and so, so good. So Waverly. And when she rises and wraps her arms around him, reaches up on her toes to place a grateful kiss on his rough cheek, Nicole is certain–they’re all going to be okay.


End file.
